Analogy between information retrieval and education

This work is presented as a challenge paper for a symposium on education for information science to be held by the American Documentation Institute in September, 1965. The paper suggests that both searching for information in a collection of stored messages and searching for information in the process of education have been subject to and shaped by one basic constraint—the very limited rates of flow of information into human sense channels. It is shown how information retrieval and education each have surmounted the same difficulty in the same way, by many‐1 homomorphic transformations on messages which greatly reduce their word (or bit) content while preserving certain minimum invariants which identify the messages. From the homomorphic reductions, sensing time has been reduced further by means of the equivalence classes derived from the “vocabularies” in which the reduced messages are recoded. A quantitative partial model of information retrieval (to be presented in greater detail elsewhere) is suggested as homomorphic with education. Some possible applications to education in general and to education for information science in particular are discussed.